Best of Technical Support

I have installed shadow-ina-box-1.2 and all the accounts that I created after the installation get the following error when they try to change their password:

homepage:~$passwd
Changing password for user_name
The password for user_name cannot be changed

Is there a solution to this or will I have to revert to an open password file? —Mike Pelley

I'd guess that one of two things is happening here. Either your passwd binary doesn't have the right permissions, or you are still using your old non-shadow passwd binary.

In order for passwd to make changes to the passwd file, it must be suid root. To check this, try doing ls -l `which passwd`. It should print something like this:

-r-s--x--x   1 root     bin          3152 May  4  1994 /usr/bin/passwd

The important things are the s in the first column and the root in the third column. If you don't see the s, do a chmod u+s `which passwd` as root. If the file isn't owned by root (the root in the third column), do chown root `which passwd`.

Before you do all of that though, double check that what you are running really is the binary that shadow-ina-box installed. Do which passwd and make sure that's the right passwd binary. —Steven Pritchard, Southern Illinois Linux Users Group stever@silug.org

I print over a network setup. My problem is that when I print text files I cannot control the font size, and lines are cut off at the end. Is there any utility that will help me convert a text file to PostScript in any font size, because I have no problem printing PostScript. —Eskinder Mesfin

GNU enscript is a drop-in replacement for the enscript program. Enscript converts ASCII files to PostScript and writes the generated output to a file or sends it directly to the printer.

It is available from: prep.ai.mit.edu:/pub/gnu/enscript-1.4.0.tar.gz. —Rory Toma, WebTV Networks rory@corp.webtv.net

The nenscript program does what you want. It has numerous options to control the font, paper size, lines per page, number of copies, and so forth.

You might want to look into the magicfilter utility. This is a nifty little program that allows you to transparently print almost any kind of file to any reasonable printer. It installs as a print filter and uses some heuristics to determine the file type and work accordingly. I got my copy from Sunsite. —Bob Hauck, Wasatch Communications Group bobh@wasatch.com

Try the apsfilter (aps 4.9.1) available on every linux-mirror. —Klaus Franken, S.u.S.E. GmbHkfr@suse.de